The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam

Old Meets New

The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam was built in 1656 and holds some of the most important collections of historic maritime documents in the world. Beyond its impressive collection of documents, the museum is a modern marvel of technology. Rather than simply gazing at maritime artifacts under glass, visitors can engage with exhibits through multimedia, video games, and more. Staff managing these exhibits frequently has to work with large streaming video and other multimedia files on their mobile devices. This wasn’t always possible, until the museum adopted VMware Horizon View and VMware User Environment Manager to improve employee experiences and reduce energy consumption—all on a limited budget.

The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam and VMware

The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam and VMware

Bringing Exhibits to Life

Museum staff work with a growing body of large multimedia files, and, until recently, it was making their computers very slow. Login times reached 4 to 5 minutes and streaming video—a museum staple—could barely be used at all. The museum’s IT group wanted museum employees to have a seamless experience with fast login times, ample power to edit multimedia, and the freedom to work remotely using mobile devices at their convenience. After a thorough market evaluation, museum IT chose a VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that is affordable, robust, and reliable.

With increased capacity, the museum can now digitize more maritime documents and enrich visitor experiences

With shorter log-in times, staff can get working sooner

The new system operates 24/7/365, on any device

Helpdesk support requests went from 3 a day to just 1 a week

The National Maritime Museum

Conserving Resources

The National Maritime Museum constantly seeks ways to conserve resources to meet its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) guidelines. The previous solution did not support everyday staff activities, and above all was also consuming a lot of energy. Long login times, the inability to work remotely on mobile devices, and the need to maintain active licenses—even for inactive users—all contributed to increased resource consumption. With the VMware solution, the museum is meeting its CSR goals by conserving computing resources and licenses and allowing employees to stay productive, whether they are working at home or in the office.

What The National Maritime Museum has to say about us

"Two departments depend substantially on multimedia. Now these staff members can work easily with compute-intensive applications, wherever they are and whatever device they are using. Everything runs a lot faster."

VMware ThinApp is an agentless application virtualization solution that isolates applications from their underlying operating systems to eliminate application conflict and streamline delivery and management.